In the last several decades, TV game shows became a major part of family entertainment in the United States and around the world. Drawing tremendous audiences from all walks of life, the first successful game shows initially brought in tremendous income to advertisers and TV stations. However, with time, the number of game shows has increased. Old successful shows are losing their novelty and appeal. And few fresh ideas are finding their way to the TV-screens. The newer shows are trying to refresh, or put a new spin on the old game concepts. Thus, TV stations are trying to attract viewers by enhancing old shows, such as “Jeopardy” with celebrity hosts, creating such shows as “Celebrity Jeopardy,” for example. But slight new spins on the old ideas are not enough to keep the audiences from eventually becoming bored with the show. Bright lights and loud whistles of the new shows soon become background noise for the audiences. And large sums and shiny prizes won by Tele-contestants remain unreal and impersonal for people in front of the TV. It's fun for TV-viewers to see someone in TV-land win cars and trips, the first few times they see it. But it does not make the life for living-room fans any better. They are not part of the action, they do not get the share of the winning pie, and their roof still leaks. And this makes even the brightest shows and sweetest TV prizes dim and sour for them.
The solution to this problem, offered by the present invention, is in finding a way to keep the TV viewers personally interested and involved in the show. Attempts to keep the viewers personally interested have been made by some TV shows such as Regis and Kelly. This show at one time allowed the audience members to send in letters with their names to the show. One of these letters was then selected from the pile. The lucky sender of the letter received a prize. Such an approach was intended to keep the audience members who sent in the letter interested in watching the show, wondering whether their envelope will be picked.
However, several problems are inherent in this approach. Only the regular audience members are likely to be aware of this promotion at all. Of the audience members who know of the promotion, only a few would be willing to put in the time, effort, and cost or preparing and mailing in the participation forms. Even of those who would be willing to participate in this promotion, many would naturally have doubts as to whether their envelopes would really participate in the drawing. How do they know that the winning envelope is not pulled out of the bag containing a hundred envelopes with the same name? Such a drawing, with questionable fairness procedures, requiring effort on behalf of the audience to enter, and mostly limited to regular viewers of the show, is unlikely to attract new audiences to the show and provide any financial advantages to advertisers and broadcasters.
What is needed in the art, and what the present invention provides, is a new method of engaging the viewers into watching the show by giving viewers a vested interest in the outcome of the show. The method must allow each person, who tunes in to watch the show, an opportunity of winning a tangible prize (such as a sum of money) or an opportunity to share in the prize won by show contestants. Such an opportunity to win must be open to almost every member of the viewing public, without any requirement of pre-registration for winning, so as to encourage as many eligible people as possible, to watch the show. At the same time, the method must only reward those who remained tuned in and watched the show, preferably in its entirety. The method must also provide a clear, unbiased, and absolutely random way of selecting a winner, giving every viewer who tunes in an opportunity to win. Such a method, encouraging the maximum possible number of people to watch the show and the embedded advertisements, would greatly increase the profits for advertisers and broadcasters. The method described in present invention achieves all of these objectives and provides numerous other benefits.